Port 25: The Open Source Community at Microsoft : sam ramji, App

Supernova

Sam Ramji — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 16:22:00 GMT

I’m writing this from EclipseCon in Santa Clara, California, where I’m going to announce the beginning of Microsoft’s collaborative work with the Eclipse Foundation.

This started about a year ago when I met Mike Milinkovich at an open source event (the Open Source Software Think Tank 2007) where we were seated at the same table, and assigned to discuss “key issues inhibiting the growth of open source”. We found we had pretty similar ways of looking at problems – I found Mike to be very pragmatic and straightforward in his thinking. That discussion led to a conversation about what we could do to help Eclipse developers building software for Windows.

At the same time, the CardSpace team at Microsoft was already working actively with the Higgins Project to establish a secure, interoperable framework for user identity on the web – an architecture known as the Identity Metasystem. Since the inception of Higgins, the CardSpace team has worked very closely with the Higgins team, providing them the protocol documentation they needed to be able to build an identity selector that is interoperable with CardSpace, as well as placing those protocol specifications under the OSP so that they knew that it was safe to do so. We share a commitment to building a user-centric, privacy-preserving, secure, easy-to-use identity layer for the Internet.

Currently, Higgins, Microsoft, and dozens of other companies and projects are in the midst of the third OSIS-sponsored user-centric identity interop, where we all try our code together, providing the data needed to improve both our implementations and the interoperability between them.

Among a range of other opportunities (which we’re still working on), we discovered that Steve Northover (the SWT team lead) had gotten requests to make it easy for Java developers to write applications that look and feel like native Windows Vista. He and a small group of developers built out a prototype that enables SWT to use Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). We’re committing to improve this technology with direct support from our engineering teams and the Open Source Software Lab, with the goal of a first-class authoring experience for Java developers.

This is exciting to me – as a Java developer in my prior life (as well as the first technical marketing manager for BEA’s WebLogic Workshop, now Apache Beehive) it just makes sense to enable Java on Windows. We started a collaborative effort with JBoss two years ago that continues to this day. At the end of the day, it’s all about the developer. There will be more to come from the conversations that Eclipse and Microsoft have begun, and I look forward to announcing those in the future as we have demonstrable technology results.

Cheers,
Sam

Eclipse Executive Director, Mike Milinkovich, Talks with Sam

Sam Ramji — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 18:21:00 GMT

Mike Milinkovich is the Executive Director of the Eclipse Foundation - an open source community - supported by a non-profit foundation - dedicated to building an open source development environment. In this podcast, Mike joins us to discuss some history around Eclipse, the larger open source community - and his varied background in accounting and computer science. Mike also touches on the architecture of participation's impact on the foundation and the development team behind the Eclipse platform.

For interested Eclipse users, Sam will be speaking at this year's EclipseCon 2008 - stay tuned to Port 25 for more information as that draws closer.

Python, Java, Ruby, Oh My! Silverlight Alpha 1.1 ships with Dynamic Language Support

MichaelF — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 18:45:00 GMT

Mix 07 kicked off today with keynotes from Ray Ozzie and Scott Guthrie. Amongst announcements regarding media and Silverlight Scott Guthrie announced the release of a cross-platform version of the .NET framework within Silverlight Alpha 1.1. Included is a Dynamic Language Runtime that allows developers to use languages such as Python, Java and Ruby to program in Silverlight.

I could drone on about this but we decided to go sit down with two of the individuals who contributed to this effort: Jim Hugunin and John Lam instead. Jim, who we interviewed before, gives us some insight into this announcement including some information about new MS-PL releases to Codeplex tied to this announcement (Hint: IronPython 2.0).

Later today, we will post the second interview with John Lam.

Video: Python, Java, Ruby, Oh My! Silverlight Alpha 1.1 ships with Dynamic Language Sup

Taking the Heavy Lifting out of Game Development

MichaelF — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 23:21:00 GMT

In this interview Sam sits down with a veteran of the gaming industry, Star Trek Deck Plan Expert and Development Manager for the XNA Community Game Platform: Frank Savage. Sam and Frank discuss his background and how he ended up at Microsoft as well as the finer points of XNA. Included are demos of both games that have been developed using XNA as well as how XNA eases much of the work associated with game development allowing users to focus on the game itself.

Video: Taking the Heavy Lifting out of Game Development

You can download XNA Express Studio and the XNA Framework here.

Developer Resources for Open Source Software on Vista

MichaelF — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 14:10:00 GMT

Recently we posted about http://www.devreadiness.com, an online resource for Vista Application Compatibility questions/guidance. After posting we received some feedback that with some changes they could become much more useful for Open Source Developers. Based on this feedback we are going to create a set of resources specifically tailored for the open source developer/ISV.

This is where we would like some help. We can move forward with this based on our understanding and assumptions or we can involve our community and ensure that the “right” changes are being made. To this end we are seeking a small group of volunteers who would be willing to act as a review/guidance team. This endeavor should not be tremendously time consuming. We anticipate a single review/feedback cycle of existing content to get us started. After an initial pass we will request one to two more review cycles to ensure we are on the right path.

While the time required is not tremendous, the impact of your participation will be. Please drop a line to port25@microsoft.com if you are interested.

Thanks!

Sam

Talking Mono with Miguel de Icaza

MichaelF — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 14:30:00 GMT

In this, the last of our interviews from the LANG.NET Symposium, Sam sits down with Miguel de Icaza, VP Development Platform at Novell and co-founder of Ximian. Miguel is also responsible for starting two Open Source project you may have heard of: GNOME and Mono.

In this interview Sam and Miguel talk about the history behind Mono, the current state of the project and Miguel's thoughts on Mono as it relates to .NET.

Video: Talking Mono with Miguel de Icaza

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